Friends: The great treasure of this life is faith in Jesus Christ … and it isn’t complicated.  Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #1006

February 24, 2026

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Simple Faith

By Bob Walters

“Can it really be that simple?” – Character Ben Gates in the movie, National Treasure

If you know the 2004 movie National Treasure, you know that the lock to the world’s greatest fictitious treasure chamber – located under a Wall Street church in New York City – is unlocked by inserting an ornate tobacco pipe and rotating it with the stem.

Everything about finding the pipe and then locating the lock opening the chamber is the adventure of the movie.  But for all the riddles and complexity, in the end, accessing the uncountable treasure is as simple as insert, turn, and push a button.

Our searching human hearts, minds, and souls are unbound by such manmade mechanics, but discovering the faith we have in Jesus Christ and the treasure it leads to in God’s Kingdom is the glorious light of God’s unfathomable riches and His gift to us.

It is our faith – given by God, accepted by us – that is the proof of God’s treasure and our assurance not merely of life everlasting, but life everlasting with God as part of His treasure. We make our faith overly complicated wondering if God loves us or is mad at us, what he wants us to do or not do, and what He is going to do with us later.

My experience has been that as I journeyed on the path, it wasn’t my life that got easier, it was my faith that became stronger, simpler, less confusing, and more free.

You have no doubt noticed, as I have, that much of our modern culture depends on fear to gain and hold our attention, control our hopes, limit our freedom, and shape a world without personal assurance in and love of Jesus Christ. That’s the part of the path that gets easier: the part that focuses more and more on Christ and less and less on the fears attendant to this world. This is our freedom in the heavenly realms.

Yes, “Fear the Lord.” Respect Him, know His sense of humor has limits, and be infinitely convinced that His righteousness is absolute and unchanging.  That does sound scary and epitomizes a fearsome imprecation. That is the trustworthy God.

But also, Jesus says, “Fear not.”  Simple faith in Christ – which oddly is a mysterious mix of both mature faith and childlike faith – is the most uncomplicated key to unlock the door of the kingdom into which we are invited.  Ask all the questions you like.  Talk to God and express doubts, ask for wisdom, pray for strength, beg His truth, know His peace.  This too is the trustworthy God, freeing us from fear, with love.

I never worry about God being mad at me because – with my faith in Jesus – I know God doesn’t see me; God sees His Obedient Son Jesus on the Cross. That doesn’t give me license to sin; that gives me purpose for living in the joy, hope, freedom, and love His sacrifice provides. My sin is covered by His blood of the Cross.

We are studying James in our Logos Sunday school class, which I’m teaching this month while regular teacher Dave Schlueter is thawing out in southern Florida. Our section this week is James 2:14-26, Faith and Deeds, which folks often incorrectly view as one or the other, not both as the same. The Holy Spirit lights and guides both paths.

Those quick to theologically debate needn’t think this is a “salvation” issue; it is a “quality of this life” issue.  When we have faith in Christ, His light and Spirit will not stay inside us. The fun of a life in Christ is our deeds – our works – that aren’t performed to impress the world but to inspire our joy and usefulness and purpose of our faith.

God doesn’t need us to impress Him with works. He already knows we’ll be happier if we teach about Him by sharing Jesus and loving others. It’s as simple as that. 

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows of no treasure greater than faith in Christ.

Friends: It is a mix of joy, faith, and gratitude, not self-inflicted misery, that defines a Christian life. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #1005

February 17, 2026

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Sack Cloth and Ashes

By Bob Walters

“It will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.” – Jesus, leveling a condemnation at Capernaum, Matthew 11:24

You know the story well. John the Baptist is in prison, not exactly condemned but knowing Herod wants him dead for criticizing Herod’s marriage to Herodius.

Contemplating his own imminent fate, John sends his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:3). This question leads Jesus – who isn’t yet ready to say, “Yes, it’s me” – to recount His own miracles, and identify several of those who have seen miracles but not believed.

This included the town of Capernaum on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus performed much of his ministry. As a shortcut, I asked A.I., “Why was Jesus mad at Capernaum?” A.I.’s answer: “...because of [Capernaum’s] unrepentant hearts, their stubborn unbelief, and indifference despite being the primary location of his ministry and witnessing the most ‘mighty works.’ Despite being treated as ‘his own city,’ the town failed to believe or repent.” Sodom, you see, didn’t know Jesus; Capernaum did.

It is worth reading the rest of Matthew 11:1-24 as Jesus speaks to the gathered crowd, noting the unmistakable and famous condemnation of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18, 19) and that it will be worse for Capernaum. (John’s ultimate fate, his beheading, took place at the hilltop palace of Herod Antipas at Machaerus, east of the Dead Sea in Jordan, approximately A.D. 30, is recorded in Matthew 14:1-12 and Mark 6:14-29.)

What Capernaum was facing, and what every Christian knows, is that once the presence and truth of Jesus have been revealed to a person – and His presence and truth are rejected – woe to the unbeliever and the unrepentant. None of us is exactly sure how God’s grace and mercy work for those who have never heard the word of God or encountered Jesus. But Jesus had lived, preached, and performed miracles there, and to paraphrase many Bible verses, the people of Capernaum “believed Him not.”

Our greatest personal gift is to know Jesus, believe He is the Christ, accept His grace and love, and live in repentance – renewed thinking – knowing our own sin but also trusting God’s forgiveness. “Sack cloth and ashes” is the Bible’s way of signaling our own sorrow and humility, and our discipline of repentance. It indicates our low moments.

Yet I am sure Jesus does not want us to live that way: Our joy is our strength.

We examine the life of Jesus, the very few of his years we know about, and despite His looming fate Jesus lived what I perceive to be – what I hope was – a life of joy. It seems that from the young age of 12 Jesus knew who He was. And at the start of His ministry in his late 20s, we see signals that He knew the tasks, obedience, and crucifixion ahead.

Incarnate Jesus is God become man.  What God made “very good” in His own image – humanity – Jesus is God’s perfect image and visitation into that now fallen and imperfect creation. There was a scene in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ movie (2004) of Jesus as a young carpenter laughing with his mother Mary. While that is a movie I never want to see again, the imagined image of Jesus knowing moments of joy, despite being a “man of sorrows,” gives me comfort, even if it is a made-up vignette of cinematography.

This week, on Ash Wednesday, some Christian denominations begin the observance of Lent, 40 days of fasting and prayer ending on Resurrection Sunday, Easter. The celebration typically involves “giving up” – sacrificing – some favored thing, but must properly be met with renewed focus and prayer on the gifts we have received.

Despite the “sack cloth and ashes,” we honor Jesus by being joyous for His gift.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) continually states his belief that repentance reaches far beyond behaviors and into spiritual and intellectual transformation: Think like a Christian.

Friends: Want to find meaning in this world? Better look to the life beyond. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #1004

February 4, 2026

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Looking Beyond

By Bob Walters

“God will bring to judgment both the righteous and the wicked.” – Ecclesiastes 3:17

Now there’s a cheerful thought: we will all get what’s coming to us.

As Christians, we know the righteousness of Jesus covers what we accept to be our fallen wickedness. If any person is interested in heaven, or in a loving God, restored eternal relationship with that God, or is seeking divine purpose and ultimate meaning in this present realm, then faith in Jesus is the only way, truth, and life to attain them.

Our job at hand isn’t to defeat our wickedness; we can’t, although it doesn’t hurt to try. Our goal, our faith, is to accept the love and truth of God. Then, to love others.

On the other hand, if a person in this life has no interest or belief in those divine things, or perhaps is openly contemptuous of, hostile to, or cynical about them, it makes no logical sense in this life to worry about spending eternity with someone, i.e. Jesus, in someplace, i.e., heaven, they already reject. Are you going to like Jesus better later?

We all, as Christians, pray for those folks.  We call them the lost.

This is the lesson in Luke 16:19-31 of poor, sick Lazarus in heaven and the rich man viewing him from hell. The rich man awoke too late to the truth of his sin, and once he departed this life, there was nothing he could do to save his sons from the same fate.

Every time I settle into my gratitude for the sacrifice of Jesus and his gift of freedom from sin’s eternal consequence, I am unsettled knowing many are still shackled to their sin.  It is not only their forever fate I grieve but their absence of light in this life, seeing the things of God as meaningless, and the things of this world as supreme.

I don’t want people first to fear judgment; I want them first to feel God’s love.

It is a tough nut to crack.  Ecclesiastes famously declares all things of this life as “meaningless.” Yet, why would a loving, creative, rational, and relational God create a world and its inhabitants for no discoverable purpose? It wouldn’t be logical or rational.

Then look again at Ecclesiastes 3:17, about God’s judgment of our righteousness and wickedness. None of us likes judgment, we all think our opinions are righteous, and many folks seriously wonder if their wickedness (if wickedness is real) truly matters.

We know Christians who are awful, and we know “lost” folks we would trust with our lives. So how do we put this together: that this life means something glorious, God’s love is as immutable as it is righteous, and faith in Jesus is the only key that unlocks heaven’s door? And, why would we want that? Don’t we just want to be happy now?

As widely as I do not understand either end of the Bible – creation or restoration – what I have learned is that God does only what is just and true and righteous. That I do not understand all of it is of no consequence. What is of consequence is whether I trust Jesus’s promise and believe God’s love. The Seeker in Ecclesiastes is looking for meaning on this earth. He learns the only way to find it is to look beyond, to God.

My mentor George Bebawi often made the very helpful point not to look at judgment and mercy as opposites; they work together. The greatest secular problem of this age, culturally, politically, and philosophically, is that we are quick to levy judgments on others without considering the joy and righteousness – and peace – of mercy.

God’s judgment on us all is guaranteed, and God’s righteousness is eternal. His mercy toward humanity is the component of judgment that Jesus delivered on the cross.

Mercy doesn’t erase wickedness; only Jesus could do that. Our lives in this realm are blessed, though, when we look with mercy and faith beyond the ugliness of sin.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows that God put a longing in our hearts…for God.

Friends: In Jesus we are free to do what is right, not to do whatever we want. See the column.  Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #1003

February 3, 2026

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Free, But Responsible

By Bob Walters

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free … The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.” Paul, Galatians 5:1,6

Having myself grown up in the “do your own thing” 1960s and then maturing in the “Me Decade” of the 1970s, I look back with dumbfounded gratitude that it was responsibility that my father pounded into me from an early age.

I’m neither perfect nor bragging, though I had a friend in college who leveled a criticism at me saying, “You don’t have to be responsible all the time.” But long before I had true Christian faith or freedom, I had, thanks to Dad, an on-board, secular sense of responsibility along with, sparing specifics, no shortage of examples of irresponsibility. 

The second of four kids born 1952-1959, I shared standard kid household chores like setting the table, clearing the table, washing the dishes, drying the dishes, taking out the trash, burning the papers (in our backyard we had a metal incinerator that looked like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz; trash went in a trash can; paper refuse was burned in the incinerator located between the garage and our basketball goal).

Any lack of attention to these or other chores was met with a sternly worded speech from Dad on being responsible. And it was many years later that I grew to fully appreciate the importance of what Dad was telling me.  It means far more to me today in a Christian sense and a civic sense than it ever did about pulling my weight at home.

In Galatians, and really in much of Paul’s writing and the New Testament overall, our freedom authored by Jesus was a function of “faith expressed through love” (Gal. 5:6), not about chores but about salvation. We think mainly of salvation from sin, but Paul was teaching salvation generally from death and specifically from the law.

Galatians overall is Paul’s book coaching believers in Jesus to understand that the game in Christ was now departed from the “yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1) presented by the Old Testament Law. My Bible mentor George Bebawi, who by the way, in Egypt, grew up Jewish and converted to Christ in his late teens, constantly made the point that Galatians was “a stick of dynamite” leveled against the Jews who refused to recognize Jesus as the Messiah. “Think like a Christian, not like a Jew,” was his common refrain.

This, at its most basic, is the meaning of “repent” (metanoia): Think anew.

Sadly, too many people through the ages – and our age is no different – see this difference of worldview, across all religions, as fighting words meant to wipe out opponents. With our freedom in Christ, we are urged to love God, our neighbor, and our enemy.  We are to be free of the enmity and condemnation the world so exemplifies.

And I’ll add, sadly even in our Christian family through the ages, history shows us that the name of Jesus and the idea of Christ have often created as much intramural havoc and hatred as any beliefs from the outside. In the centuries up through, say, the 1600s, Christian-on-Christian violence was a regular occurrence.  We see little of that today, but the mindsets of various Christian churches teach vastly different attitudes when it comes to the spirit of the age and the liberality of just what we are free to do.

As I teach high school students about history and government from the worldview of Christ and the authority of scripture, my dominant, accompanying point is that the most important, operative aspect of freedom is responsibility, Christian responsibility, of love for God and others. Jesus came to save, not condemn (John 3:17, Romans 8:1).

It is not about doing what we want to do; it is wanting to do what is right.

Walters’ (rlwcom@aol.com) father John passed away in September, 1991.